How Foe author Iain Reid uses AI and climate change as metaphors for a fraying marriage

Iain Reid's electrifying second novel, Foe, has been adapted for the big screen. The dystopian thriller is set in the near future, centred around AI and climate change, but ultimately, it's a story about a strained marriage.

The film adaptation stars Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan as a couple living on an isolated farm as the planet becomes increasingly uninhabitable. Their lives are thrown into turmoil when a stranger from a government agency unexpectedly arrives to tell them that the husband has been conscripted to live on a space station for two years. In his absence, an android will take his place on Earth.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Reid says there were two distinct seeds of inspiration for Foe. Firstly, he had always wanted to draw on his brother's expertise as a space engineer for one of his stories. The second seed of inspiration came to him during an award ceremony he attended, as he listened to the recipient of the award thank his wife in his acceptance speech.

"For whatever reason, in that moment, something about that seemed unsettling to me," Reid recalls. "I just thought, 'Well, what is her thing? What does she do? It's not just to prop up his genius or whatever.' And so I started thinking about that type of relationship, that type of marriage, where narratives are written within the relationship.

"I realized that that type of relationship felt confining. And so I kind of had this setting of an old farmhouse, which also feels confining when there's only two people there and it's in the middle of nowhere. So I realized quickly that, well, the opposite of that is space — it's literally endless, it goes on forever. And so I realized this would sort of be my space book somehow. And with that, with those basic ingredients, I just started writing Foe."

WATCH | Official trailer for Foe:

While Reid is fascinated by AI (he started writing the book eight or nine years ago, before AI was widely discussed in the mainstream), he says he mostly used it as a narrative device to explore what really interested him.

"I was learning a lot about AI at that time and I wanted to include that somehow," he tells Power. "Over the first draft, I realized that that was really not what I was interested in, you know. That was, again, just sort of this narrative technique to get at what I was interested in, which was this couple, this relationship….

"And so all the AI and the space stuff, and the climate aspect of it, really are metaphors for this main thing that I'm writing about, which is the marriage, and a particular kind of marriage. It's not a marriage that is, you know, affected by one dramatic event, which I think we often see depicted in film and novels — an affair or something like that — but something that is affected slowly over time."

The full interview with Iain Reid is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He also talks about co-writing Foe's screenplay with director Garth Davis, working with actors Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan, and what it's like writing novels that get adapted for the screen. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Iain Reid produced by Lise Hosein.